After spending six months resting on their lees the first wines of 2023 are now being prepared. However, as we still have good stocks of our (fantastic) 2022 Castro Martin Family Estate, the tanks which have been selected for this special wine will not be touched, perhaps for another few months at least.

Although we only make a mono-varietal albariño wine not every tank is identical, there are many variations, usually dependant upon the original source vineyard used to make each tank. For this reason, we always select a number of tanks according to their different attributes – flavours, textures, structure, balance etc.

I always equate this process to cooking, taking a number of ‘ingredients’ and trying to imagine how they might compliment each other when put together, but even more importantly, how they might evolve over time. There is a lot of trial and error involved, based almost entirely on the taste of each sample blend that we try. Once the final mix is decided, it is then down to the ‘simple’ task of moving thousands of litres of wine around the cellar, akin to one huge game of chess!

Of course, these wines need to be racked into clean tanks anyway (to separate the clean wine from their lees), and so by blending at this moment we can actually kill two birds with one stone (and thus minimise the number of times that each tank is moved). In some cases, these wines may never be moved again until they are actually bottled.

To be honest, blending is one of my favourite jobs of the year as there is always a great deal of satisfaction in tasting the ‘finished’ wines (after allowing some days for the individual component wines to marry together completely).

Meanwhile, in the vineyards, it is time to grub up and replant a few vines. These may have come to the end of their working life or perhaps simply started to die off, which sometimes happens. The weather over the last three weeks or so has been must better, with dry, sunny days many of which were tempered a little by cold easterly or northerly winds. Unfortunately, this is set to change in the coming days as yet more rain looms just over the horizon.

So, it seems like the end of the 2023 marathon has finally arrived. It has been a campaign fraught with difficulties, starting with the technical problems of our two very first presses, to our steadily depleting picking team (towards the end). To be brutally honest it has been long and exhausting and I’m sure that every single member of our team will be looking forward to getting home and putting their feet up – I can hear the sighs of relief from every side!

Of course, as I explain ever year, on the final day, we have to wait until every grape is inside the bodega and weighed before we can load the final presses. Obviously we don’t want to be left with an odd pallet of grapes that we can’t press. The minimum capacity of our smallest press is 3,000 kg and so every kilo has to be calculated and evenly distributed to make full loads.

Early assessment of the wine is good, supported by well balanced analyses from our lab. Good concentration of fruit, surprising viscous (despite the recent rains), albeit with an average alcohol a little lower than last year. We estimate somewhere between 12% and 12.5%.

Now that everything is done in the vineyards our undivided attention shifts to the cellar, seeding and monitoring fermentations for the next couple of weeks.

Well, we’re still here…. the harvest that keeps giving and giving, which is actually a euphemism for saying ‘never ending’. After so many days I feel like I am running out of things to say.

The weather is good, and our (smallish) team of pickers are working flat out to try to bring this year’s campaign to an end. As I have mentioned in one of my previous posts there is an acute shortage of experienced people this year. Luckily the core or our picking team are very loyal to us and work extremely hard. Unfortunately other bodegas have not been quite so lucky. We hear tales of groups abandoning the job mid-harvest as they discover that a neighbouring bodega is paying a euro or two more. These days it feels like the main consequence of these things is always financial – last year bodegas were obliged to pay a top price for their grapes, whereas this year it is for the pickers. Post Covid we have been hit with every possible type of increase. Grapes, pickers, transport and every single element of our packaging, all at a time when end consumers have much tighter budgets to work with.

I think I mentioned that many of our pickers also work in the sea, gathering seafood. The evidence of this is clear when you see their improvised lunch table. On an upturned grape case, they set up their small stoves and today, tuck into one of my very favourite types of shellfish – razor clams, or ‘navajas’ as they are known locally.

Despite the slow progress outside, our work inside the cellar continues as more tanks are seeded.

It looks like the bad weather is finally behind us, and so we should now simply be able to concentrate on final days of harvest and winemaking.

On the subject of winemaking, today is a very busy day down in our tank room. Racking several tanks and seeding three more, which for a bodega of our size means a lot of work. The racking process is comparatively simple, as I have explained many times in the past. The ‘seeding’ process (adding yeast to support the fermentation), is, by contrast, quite a long and drawn out procedure when done correctly.

The first phase of seeding is to rehydrate the yeast, very much as you would do in baking. Simply add water, at body temperature (about 37°C or 98°F), and leave for at least 10 minutes (left hand photo). Once the yeast is rehydrated we start to add grape must from the tank, bringing down the temperature in small increments. To goal is to reduce the yeast mixture to within about 5°C of the tank that we are seeding. For example, if the tank to be seeded is at 15°C, we need to reduce the yeast mixture to about 20°C before we can add it to the tank. The problem is that we cannot simply add the cool grape must to the yeast in one go, a huge and sudden change of temperature would simply kill the yeast. This is why we add the grape must slowly, bit by bit, stopping between additions to allow the yeast to recover. During this process, and once the first grape juice is added to the warm yeast mixture, it immediately reacts with the sugar and produces a thick foam (sometimes depending on the strain of yeast used). The two middle pictures show the foam, and the last picture is an artwork by Angela, adding the initials of our business!

To be honest, I wasn’t sure whether to call this Day 8 or Day 9 of our harvest. Yesterday, apart from some work in the cellar, our picking was halted for bad weather. Forecasts on Friday said that we should expect heavy rain for most of the day, whereas the reality was that it rained during the night, but by mid-morning it had stopped and then remained completely dry (and even quite sunny by the afternoon). Having said that, it was good to give our people a rest, as with a smaller team, they have all been working that bit harder.

On a bright sunny Sunday morning we re-launched our campaign, with the hope that in a couple of days we should be finished (hopefully sometime between now and Christmas!!).

Today we picked one or two of our smaller, more local vineyards (probably just over 1km from the bodega). Using a combination of tractors, vans and a small truck we actually managed to move everything into our grape reception quite quickly. With the presses working all afternoon the end result was that our bodega team did not need to work half of the night, and they were probably all at home, safely tucked up in bed by midnight!

Well, it’s been slow progress so far, and we’re barely half way through our harvest. Having said that, judging by the volume of tractors and trailers in the street today, there are many bodegas that are only just starting. I have no idea why they would delay for so long?

In bright, sunny conditions we continued to pick our vineyards (selected in order of maturity of the fruit, and overall quality). When bad weather looms all around us we certainly don’t want to ‘leave the best ’til last’, our attitude is quite the opposite in fact!

As mentioned, progress in 2023 is not quite as  quick as we would have liked, not just because of the weather, but probably more to do with being able to recruit experienced, quality pickers. In many industries throughout Spain there are already labour shortages, and so trying to find people to work for just a week or so is quite difficult to say the least. Apart from paying them a competitive rate, we try to look after them with a supply of drinks and small snacks (also the occasional ice cream when the weather is hot). Small gestures, but usually well appreciated.

Today’s picture shows just a couple of minor mishaps where cases have been damaged in transit. When our forklifts load and unload the trucks it is more or less inevitable that with such volume there will be a few incidents along the way. (Luckily the grapes are still useable!)

Inside the bodega, tastings of our first musts are very favourable. Ripe, fruity and surprisingly unctuous, but not forgetting an underlying acidity which is not always so obvious when there is so much sugar present.

At Castro Martin you may have noticed the term ‘Sobre Lías’ on our labels, which translated means ‘on the lees’. The lees ageing of our wine forms an important part of our wine making process. The lees themselves are the exhausted or dead yeast cells that fall to the bottom of the tank once the alcoholic fermentation is finished. They are loaded with mannoproteins, which, when left in contact, can have a number of beneficial effects on our wines (assuming of course, that they are monitored regularly, mostly by tasting). Firstly, they release flavour and aroma compounds, as well as adding texture. They produce proteins that reduce tannins, which is helpful as tannin is not really required in white wines. Finally, the ‘reductive’ properties of the lees can also provide protection against oxidation, thus giving the final wine an extended shelf life.

So what is batonnage? This is really just a posh way of saying that we stir the lees from time to time, which helps them to stay suspended in the wine and increase the benefit of the lees contact. (It is a little like stirring your tea after you have added sugar – you don’t want the sugar to just sink and settle on the bottom of your cup). On the downside, lees left undisturbed can also start to produce some ‘off’ flavours and aromas, usually in the form of a stink of reduced sulphur (hydrogen sulphide). Batonnage can actually help to prevent these flavours and aromas from developing in the first place.

The decision of when, and how often to stir is a decision based on the evolution and development of the wine itself, combined with the experience and knowledge of the wine maker.

(Note: Photo is only to illustrate, we do not use barrels in our cellar)

At this time of year (apart from the pruning) perhaps one of the most important jobs in the bodega is quite simply to taste the tanks. As I have mentioned many times before our 2022 wines are resting quietly on their lees, but even so it is vitally important to monitor their progress – like keeping an eye on sleeping baby. (You assume that no harm will come to them, but you still need to make sure, if only for peace of mind).

Of course, things can go wrong, for example if the lees are not clean, they can impart off flavours to the new wine. Then we are also looking out for ‘reduction’. Reduction occurs mainly during fermentation when the yeasts are short of nitrogen, or become stressed. Having said that not all reduction is bad, there are also some important wine aroma compounds that form a part of the otherwise volatile sulphur compounds.

OK, so I don’t really want to get too technical, but suffice to say that these are some of the potential problems that we have to look out for.

On the plus side, I still think that our 2022 wines are really good, and have a great future – but there is one slight caveat to that statement. We will have to wait for them to show their full potential. Naturally, they still have another two or three months on the lees, before we will even start to disturb them, but certainly, in the case of the 2022 vintage, the longer we can wait the better.

After 2½ months of almost incessant rain, we finally have a break. The last few days have been cold with bright blue sky, and the forecast for the coming days is for more of the same. Although the rainfall has been persistent, we are probably quite lucky that we did not suffer too many extreme downpours that could have caused flooding. (In this respect, I am referring specifically to the Rias Baixas region, as other parts of Spain have not fared quite so well).

Today’s picture shows the Ria of Pontevedra (located about 10km south of our bodega), just as the cloud begins to break and bright sunlight bursts through…. a most welcome sight, especially for our heroic team still working hard on the pruning no matter what the conditions.

Inside the bodega itself there is not too much activity. There has been a very welcome trickle of export orders, especially as January can be a particularly lean month. The 2022 wines themselves are resting quietly on their lees, and our regular tastings still do not disappoint.

I wrote a few months ago about removing a few trees in the corner of one of our vineyards. The area of land that has been cleared is actually designated as vineyard, and the problem is that if we don’t exploit this very soon then we will simply lose the permission, and consequently the size of useable area will be reduced in the vineyards register accordingly.

Now that the trees have been cut, the next step is to remove the roots, flatten the area, and prepare the soil. Not a simple job at all, but in the long-term we believe that it will be a worthwhile task (I was actually going to say a fruitful exercise, but decided that this might be too unoriginal!).

Once the ground is prepared the next step will be to plant the new vines and add the posts and wires on which we will eventually train the young plants. However, the development of the plants is slow, and it will be several years before we have any useable fruit. It really is a long-term investment.

Meanwhile, in the cellar all fermentations are complete, and it is now simply a question of time and patience, as the new wine rests quietly on its lees before we really get to know the full potential of our 2022 vintage.